Leo Tolstoy

Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.

Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. - Henry David Thoreau.

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.

It's bad to be unable to stand solitude.

You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.

The true meaning of Christ's teaching consists in the recognition of love as the supreme law of life, and therefore not admitting any exceptions.

I often think with regret of that fresh, beautiful feeling of boundless, disinterested love which came to an end without having ever found self-expression or return. It is strange how, when a child, I always longed to be like grown-up people, and yet how I have often longed, since childhood's days, for those days to come back to me!

Men always did and always will err and nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.